Jerry Isaacs: US Auto Union Goes to Court Against Its Own Members

US auto union goes to court against its own members
By Jerry Isaacs
WSWS

Excerpt:

Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the relationship between the UAW and the auto companies, on the one hand, and the workers it nominally represents, on the other. After more than a quarter century of betrayed strikes and labor-management collaboration in downsizing and cost-cutting, the role of the union has been transformed—from defending, within the framework of the profit system, the elementary economic interests of auto workers, to suppressing the democratic rights of its members in order to impose the dictates of corporate America.

This process has gone hand in hand with the extirpation of any genuine rank-and-file democracy or control over the organization, its thoroughgoing bureaucratization, and a relentless ideological assault on the traditions of militant class struggle that attended the birth of the union in the great sit-down strikes of the 1930s.

Central to this degeneration has been the refusal of the UAW and the American labor movement as a whole to break with the capitalist two-party system and take the road of independent political struggle.

The UAW is not today an organization of the working class, but of a privileged and parasitic middle-class stratum whose social interests are opposed to those of the workers it claims to represent. The union engages in “collective bargaining” not to defend the jobs, wages and benefits of union members, but rather the perks, positions and privileges of the bureaucracy.

Thus the UAW made certain that the bureaucracy would profit from the very agreement that slashed its members’ wages and health benefits. The deal with GM provides for a new slush fund controlled by the UAW—the so-called Voluntary Employee Benefit Association—to which GM will initially contribute $3 billion, and which will then be funded by deferring raises and cost-of-living increases due to current GM workers.

The unions’ embrace in recent decades of outright corporatism is itself the outcome of the devil’s bargain between the American labor movement and the ruling class that was cemented in the postwar period through the purge of left-wing and socialist elements from the unions. The spectacle of the UAW’s open attack on its own membership over the last week is further proof of the irreconcilable contradiction between the defense of the interests of the working class and organizations based on nationalism and the defense of the profit system.

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